[Jorn Bergmans]

While resolution may change the size of your exported file a little, as Tero mentions, the most important thing here is the bitrate. Compressed formats don’t just save pixel information flatout, so half the pixels doesn’t always mean half the filesize.

You can increase compression by lowering the bitrate, expressed in mbit/s or megabits per second, meaning less data will be used per second of video and your file will be smaller in the end – fewer bits * same amount of seconds.
Be aware that this will decrease the quality of your overall image, so more artifacting etc may occur.

[Jorn Bergmans]

Hey, thanks for the suggestions.

I know TIFF isn’t a very nicely supported file, but that is what the animator sent us. Apparently a TIFF sequence is the best lossless output they can get out of Nuke or Fusion (not sure what they’re using)

I will check out the YUV settings when I get in tomorrow, although I can’t imagine that it would not be set to High Precision. I encountered this problem while on-lining a feature-length documentary at the post-production company where I work. It is not a personal project, so the stakes, and the settings, are set a bit higher than on my own shoddy little laptop 😉

Anyway the AE workaround fixed it, I made some small inserts importing the TIFF sequence directly instead of as a reference movie, and then exported Unc 10-bit videos from AE to paste back into the sequence.
(but I still want to check it out tomorrow cause this doesn’t answer the puzzel 😉 ) I’ll let you guys know. Thanks again.

[Jorn Bergmans]

Actually, Safari can download those .flv videos from youtube directly without having to convert it! Which is a nifty trick not a lot of people know about… (Of course then you are left with an FLV, but still)

In Safari, open your Activity window, and look for a file that might be the video you’re playing in youtube. Usually this will be the biggest file in the list, and if you’re still downloading (filling up the bar in the youtube vid) it will increase in size. They’re usually a few MB’s big, where the rest of the website’s body is only a few kb’s.
Select this file/link and copy/paste it into a new tab. That will start a download of ‘videoplayback.flv’

That videoplayback.flv is the file YouTube is playing in their player.
That is also as lossless as you will get it off YouTube.

To convert .flv back to something properly usable, you can use something like the Adobe Media Encoder.

[Jorn Bergmans]

Another free to use script is https://www.popcornisland.com/2009/03/final-cut-2-after-effects/

Basically it allows you to import .xml files of your fcp timelines, although it can be a bit wonky when you’re using weird slides, swipes or other fcp transitions. Other than that, I’ve been using this without problems for quite a while (because a. duck was a bit too pricey)

[Jorn Bergmans]

Yes the shocks that occur may well be because it is HD footage; a video will start stuttering when the bitrate it requires is higher than the drive can support. ie if your video is 30Mbit/s and your DVD only supports 25Mbit/s it will not play smoothly, or perhaps not at all.

A higher resolution will typically result in a higher bitrate as you will have more data (more pixels) to play each second.

[Jorn Bergmans]

Also, your pixel aspect ratio should be “square pixels”. DSLR cameras (or actually all new digital devices that create images) almost always use square pixels.

As for your composition’s aspect ratio, the prettiest solution very much depends on what is closest to your pictures’ aspect ratios
Although I guess the safest bet would be to go for a 4:3 aspect ratio in your sequence, to minimize the risk of old SD tv’s cropping out the left and right parts of your image. (tho 4:3 will cause pillarboxing on widescreen tv’s)

Whichever way you twist and turn this, you will have borders, and perhaps borders within borders if your photo’s are all different sizes.

Hope this helped… Good luck

[Jorn Bergmans]

Hello Dylann,

Personally, I find rendering h.264 a horrific process out of FCP itself; as you said the results will more often than not be less than optimal.
Then again, the HDV codec is not quite the optimal codec to use in editing for any purposes except when you’re on a HDV camcorder.
There’s a heap of things that can go ‘wrong’ when using HDV as it natively uses a 1.33 pixel aspect ratio to store HD video (at 1440*1080 as opposed to 1920*1080) while your captured footage will probably be square pixels (as you are recording off a ‘computer’ which uses 1920*1080 HD)

I would suggest, if possible, to export out of EyeTV using the ProRes codec; Apple’s own intermediate video codec ; it also produces big files but is a fulL HD compatible square pixel codec.
Usually I tend to work in ProRes and have FCP render out a ProRes file, then converting that to h.264 in MPEG Streamclip ( https://www.squared5.com ), because I love that little programme; it gives an excellent image quality with a very easy-to-use interface. (it uses the same QT components as your ProApps will tho, so it’s more an interface thing for me)

For HD video I would suggest setting a limited data rate to about 5000kbps, for SD about 2000 or 3000 kbps. (you can set this in Export using Quicktime Conversion in FCP)
Whether you are encoding to .mov in h.264 or .mp4 should not make a difference; both the .mov and the .mp4 container are fully capable of containing h.264 video. (in fact, .mov and .mp4 are nearly the same container, with just a few slight differences)
When in doubt, I usually refer people to the Vimeo help section; they have a pretty clear-cut list to work down for exporting videos to upload on Vimeo. You can find it here: https://vimeo.com/help/compression

hope that helps

Jorn

[Jorn Bergmans]

From what I’m reading it does indeed seem to be a codec problem. Just moving the QT program won’t move all the components with it. I would guess that HDV Firestore is a different component than your regular run-of-the-mill HDV.

You can find your QT components on your harddrive under /Library/Quicktime, it should give you a long list of Component files (extention is actually .component)
Copy those over from your old Leopard into your new one, that might fix your problem.